Many codes intended to protect gays
from harassment are illegal, conservatives argue.

By Stephanie Simon
Times Staff Writer

April 10, 2006

ATLANTA  Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for
the right to be intolerant.

Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out
against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology,
where she's a senior, bans speech that puts down others because
of their sexual orientation.

Malhotra sees that as an unacceptable infringement on her
right to religious expression. So she's demanding that Georgia
Tech revoke its tolerance policy.

With her lawsuit, the 22-year-old student joins a growing
campaign to force public schools, state colleges and private
workplaces to eliminate policies protecting gays and lesbians
from harassment. The religious right aims to overturn a broad
range of common tolerance programs: diversity training that promotes
acceptance of gays and lesbians, speech codes that ban harsh
words against homosexuality, anti-discrimination policies that
require college clubs to open their membership to all.

The Rev. Rick Scarborough, a leading evangelical, frames the
movement as the civil rights struggle of the 21st century. "Christians,"
he said, "are going to have to take a stand for the right
to be Christian."

In that spirit, the Christian Legal Society, an association
of judges and lawyers, has formed a national group to challenge
tolerance policies in federal court. Several nonprofit law firms
 backed by major ministries such as Focus on the Family
and Campus Crusade for Christ  already take on such cases
for free.

The legal argument is straightforward: Policies intended to
protect gays and lesbians from discrimination end up discriminating
against conservative Christians. Evangelicals have been suspended
for wearing anti-gay T-shirts to high school, fired for denouncing
Gay Pride Month at work, reprimanded for refusing to attend diversity
training. When they protest tolerance codes, they're labeled
intolerant.

A recent survey by the Anti-Defamation League found that 64%
of American adults  including 80% of evangelical Christians
 agreed with the statement "Religion is under attack
in this country."

"The message is, you're free to worship as you like,
but don't you dare talk about it outside the four walls of your
church," said Stephen Crampton, chief counsel for the American
Family Assn. Center for Law and Policy, which represents Christians
who feel harassed.

Critics dismiss such talk as a right-wing fundraising ploy.
"They're trying to develop a persecution complex,"
said Jeremy Gunn, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's
Program on Freedom of Religion and Belief.

Others fear the banner of religious liberty could be used
to justify all manner of harassment.

"What if a person felt their religious view was that
African Americans shouldn't mingle with Caucasians, or that women
shouldn't work?" asked Jon Davidson, legal director of the
gay rights group Lambda Legal.

Christian activist Gregory S. Baylor responds to such criticism
angrily. He says he supports policies that protect people from
discrimination based on race and gender. But he draws a distinction
that infuriates gay rights activists when he argues that sexual
orientation is different  a lifestyle choice, not an inborn
trait.

By equating homosexuality with race, Baylor said, tolerance
policies put conservative evangelicals in the same category as
racists. He predicts the government will one day revoke the tax-exempt
status of churches that preach homosexuality is sinful or that
refuse to hire gays and lesbians.

"Think how marginalized racists are," said Baylor,
who directs the Christian Legal Society's Center for Law and
Religious Freedom. "If we don't address this now, it will
only get worse."

Christians are fighting back in a case involving Every Nation
Campus Ministries at California State University. Student members
of the ministry on the Long Beach and San Diego campuses say
their mission is to model a virtuous lifestyle for their peers.
They will not accept as members gays, lesbians or anyone who
considers homosexuality "a natural part of God's created
order."

Legal analysts agree that the ministry, as a private organization,
has every right to exclude gays; the Supreme Court affirmed that
principle in a case involving the Boy Scouts in 2000. At issue
is whether the university must grant official recognition to
a student group that discriminates.

The students say denying them recognition  and its attendant
benefits, such as funding  violates their free-speech rights
and discriminates against their conservative theology. Christian
groups at public colleges in other states have sued using similar
arguments. Several of those lawsuits were settled out of court,
with the groups prevailing.

In California, however, the university may have a strong defense
in court. The California Supreme Court recently ruled that the
city of Berkeley was justified in denying subsidies to the Boy
Scouts because of that group's exclusionary policies. Eddie L.
Washington, the lawyer representing Cal State, argues the same
standard should apply to the university.

"We're certainly not going to fund discrimination,"
Washington said.

As they step up their legal campaign, conservative Christians
face uncertain prospects. The 1st Amendment guarantees Americans
"free exercise" of religion. In practice, though, the
ground rules shift depending on the situation.

In a 2004 case, for instance, an AT&T Broadband employee
won the right to express his religious convictions by refusing
to sign a pledge to "respect and value the differences among
us." As long as the employee wasn't harassing co-workers,
the company had to make accommodations for his faith, a federal
judge in Colorado ruled.

That same year, however, a federal judge in Idaho ruled that
Hewlett-Packard Co. was justified in firing an employee who posted
Bible verses condemning homosexuality on his cubicle. The verses,
clearly visible from the hall, harassed gay employees and made
it difficult for the company to meet its goal of attracting a
diverse workforce, the judge ruled.

In the public schools, an Ohio middle school student last
year won the right to wear a T-shirt that proclaimed: "Homosexuality
is a sin! Islam is a lie! Abortion is murder!" But a teen-ager
in Kentucky lost in federal court when he tried to exempt himself
from a school program on gay tolerance on the grounds that it
violated his religious beliefs.

In their lawsuit against Georgia Tech, Malhotra and her co-plaintiff,
a devout Jewish student named Orit Sklar, request unspecified
damages. But they say their main goal is to force the university
to be more tolerant of religious viewpoints. The lawsuit was
filed by the Alliance Defense Fund, a nonprofit law firm that
focuses on religious liberty cases.

Malhotra said she had been reprimanded by college deans several
times in the last few years for expressing conservative religious
and political views. When she protested a campus production of
"The Vagina Monologues" with a display condemning feminism,
the administration asked her to paint over part of it.

She caused another stir with a letter to the gay activists
who organized an event known as Coming Out Week in the fall of
2004. Malhotra sent the letter on behalf of the Georgia Tech
College Republicans, which she chairs; she said several members
of the executive board helped write it.

The letter referred to the campus gay rights group Pride Alliance
as a "sex club that can't even manage to be tasteful."
It went on to say that it was "ludicrous" for Georgia
Tech to help fund the Pride Alliance.

The letter berated students who come out publicly as gay,
saying they subject others on campus to "a constant barrage
of homosexuality."

"If gays want to be tolerated, they should knock off
the political propaganda," the letter said.

The student activist who received the letter, Felix Hu, described
it as "rude, unfair, presumptuous"  and disturbing
enough that Pride Alliance forwarded it to a college administrator.
Soon after, Malhotra said, she was called in to a dean's office.
Students can be expelled for intolerant speech, but she said
she was only reprimanded.

Still, she said, the incident has left her afraid to speak
freely. She's even reluctant to aggressively advertise the campus
lectures she arranges on living by the Bible. "Whenever
I've spoken out against a certain lifestyle, the first thing
I'm told is 'You're being intolerant, you're being negative,
you're creating a hostile campus environment,' " Malhotra
said.

A Georgia Tech spokeswoman would not comment on the lawsuit
or on Malhotra's disciplinary record, but she said the university
encouraged students to debate freely, "as long as they're
not promoting violence or harassing anyone."

The open question is what constitutes harassment, what's a
sincere expression of faith  and what to do when they overlap.

"There really is confusion out there," said Charles
C. Haynes, a senior scholar at the First Amendment Center, which
is affiliated with Vanderbilt University. "Finding common
ground sounds good. But the reality is, a lot of people on all
sides have a stake in the fight."

An
Interview With Katherine YuricaQuestions
by Terri Murray
Posted October 10, 2005

It depends on how we define democracy.
If we
limit it to mean: rule of the majority, then I see
an inherent conflict between democracy and
the great principles of the Judeo-Christian tradition,
because there is such a thing as the
tyranny
of the majority.